By Norma Adams-Wade
“I wish I knew
how it would feel
to be free.”
A song sung by Nina Simone – particularly with her masterful and intoxicating handiwork on the keyboard – is to experience emotions beyond our limited human ability to express.
Nina’s vocals unapologetically channel her inner frustration with us human creatures and how we destroy each other and this sacred planet we occupy.
It is a challenge to watch her perform and stay in your seat. Even on YouTube, and after she joined the ancestors two decades ago, the power of her musical brilliance — despite her struggle to entertain while battling her tortured and tumultuous inner demons — is overwhelming.
“I wish I could say
All the things that I should say.
Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear
For the whole round world to hear.
Those words, written by renown Black composer, pianist Billy Taylor, overflow with longings, aided by Simone’s sad facial expressions and plaintiff staring off into a blank distance no one but her, the songstress, could see.
Some who knew her describe her as a difficult diva, often overcome by her mental illness of bipolar disorder. I knew her only through her personification through the microphone and the piano keys. But I am willing to forgive any recorded record of her erupting anger if an audience member displeased her at a performance venue.
“Sit down!! Yes, you. Sit!” She once stopped singing from the piano on stage, pointed and harshly commanded. The source of her ire was a woman in the club’s audience who rose and walked around too often while Simone was crooning.
She was on a performance tour that fellow performer David Bowie encouraged her to take during an emotionally low phase of her life.
There were many such phases because of Simone’s bipolar disorder and emotional wounds from discrimination, which biographers say she combatted with alcohol and recreational drugs.
But those of us who adore her, tolerant her erraticism in favor of her genius. Her voice, her inner turmoil, mesmerized us. Syndicated columnist Stanley Crouch (no relation to gospel singer Andraé Crouch) got her when he commented about Simone in write/film producer Alan Light’s biography of her What Happened Miss. Simone?
Crouch said: “the human voice actually has greater freedom than any horn has.
And poet Maya Angelou is quoted as saying of Simone: “She is loved or feared, adored or dislikes, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation.”
Freedom sounds relaxing. But I was just thinking… how would it feel to be entirely free — separated from the many things that tie us down? Do we REALLY want to know what that freedom feels like? Family can be annoying, even maddening.
But do we want to separate from the rare but priceless, loving moments that happen in between all the chaos?
Free from it all – not only inequality, which left Simone with permanent scars – but every weight. That includes freedom from responsibilities, car-rent-mortgage payments, physical ailments, getting up each morning to make it to work on time, traffic jams, rude and uncaring attendants at the drive-through window, being cut-off by a bad driver on the freeway, kids constantly needing attention and begging for everything, relatives who come to visit and then won’t leave, a boss who focuses on your mistakes but ignores your progress and achievements, a neighbor’s dog that barks all night, a favorite meal that a bad cook ruined, a TV that blanks out during the Super Bowl game, …all of that and more.
Think with me about the freedom of being alone on a desert island. That supposedly empty space also includes mosquitoes, spiders, snakes and possibly bears.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked: “Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?”
I ask: Isolation or stay in the fight?
“I wish I could be like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly
I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea
…then I’d sing ‘cause I’d k n o w…
How it feels to be free.”
By composer, pianist
Billy Taylor
Norma Adams-Wade, is a proud Dallas native, University of Texas at Austin journalism graduate and retired Dallas Morning News senior staff writer. She is a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists and was its first southwest regional director. She became The News’ first Black full-time reporter in 1974. norma_adams_wade@yahoo.com
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